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Kingsway restaurant is a fast food restaurant with five outlets across America. Most of the restaurant’s outlets are majorly operated through franchises or affiliates and collectively, they accommodate approximately 200 employees or more. The restaurant primarily sells hamburgers, cheeseburgers, chicken produce, and a number of other common fast food American delicacies. Of late, the company has been experiencing a number of challenges with regards to its ability to sustain high profit levels, as it did in the past decade or so. This has been occasioned by a change in management.
Most of the functional areas identified as missing links to the organization’s capability of sustaining high performance can be evidenced from its organizational design (Mind Tools Ltd., 2011). The missing links entail important functional areas, such as a clear definition of the organization’s strategic goals; a lack of internal alignment to organizational goals; ineffective links to customers and a lack of external fit. These are some of the weak areas noted in the overall organizational design of the company. In demystifying these problematic areas, this study will comprehensively outline how the organization fails in ensuring the functional areas are well defined to improve organizational efficiency.
Lack of Goal Clarity
A change of management at Kingsway restaurants has significantly brought a lot of ambiguities in the strategic growth path of the organization. In other words, the organization has been very inconsistent in the manner it addresses its core strategies. Currently, management is insisting on customer satisfaction as its core strategic goal, but five months back, the same management had been insisting on strategic positioning (with regards to competitive forces) as the primary strategic goal of the organization.
The second strategy was meant to engage a number of strategies to position the company above its competitors and become the best fast-food restaurant in its regions of operation. This lack of clear definition of strategic goals have confused a number of employees on the primary strategic goal of the organization, because many do not know whether the strategic goal of the company is to be the best fast food restaurant among its peers, or to provide the best customer service in the region.
Lack of Internal Alignment
Kingsway restaurant has in the recent past grappled with the problem of internal alignment because the design of the organization has been inconsistent with the organizational structure. This has especially been noted with regards to the knowledge management process of the organization (in other words, the knowledge management approach for the company is in total disharmony with the organizational culture). This can be evidenced from the fact that the organization has a predefined strategic orientation of customer emphasis and information focus, but the organizational culture is basically centered on management orientation. In this regard, employees virtually have no say in the organizational decision-making process, except to follow managerial instructions. This problem shifts focus from customers to management, and according to Simons (2005, p. 2), it is bound to cause organizational inefficiency and increase the organization’s likelihood of not realizing its strategic goals. .
Ineffective Links to Customers
Kingsway customers have in recent years been very choosy of the service offered to them. Their demands have been equally high over the period of time, and because of this reason, the management of Kingsway has been trying to establish a good link between the organization and the customers so that they can better cater to this increased demand. Considering the success of such a strategy depends on the ability of the organization to have the required capacity to meet such customer demands, the organizational design of the company has been unable to facilitate the realization of this goal because there is no customer service department or a communication framework where customers can communicate their concerns to management. In other words, if there is a legitimate concern from a customer, there is no possible framework such a customer can communicate freely with the management, (say through a suggestion box or similar means). Simons (2005, p. 6) explains that such kind of situation can significantly reduce organizational performance.
Lack of External Fit
Kingsway restaurant has not done a good job in keeping up with the changes pertaining to the demands of the external fast-food environment. This is in reference to a continued customer demand for healthier foods in the fast food industry. Since the inception of the company, there has been continuous production of traditional and less healthy foods such as Hamburgers, french-fries, sodas and the likes, but little has been done to change the menu to meet the demand for healthier foods. This arises out of the fact that the organization has a rigid staff, which has consistently opposed the idea of preparing “unfamiliar types of foods”. Lampropoulos (2010, p. 19) notes that such a problem of staff rigidity, which causes a lack of external fit, calls for a change in the human resource strategy of the company.
Conclusion
Kingsway’s problems, to a significant degree, revolve around poor organizational designs that lead to a lot of organizational inefficiencies (regarding the manner the company operates). This study identifies that the weak functional areas of the organization’s design relate to a lack of clear definition of organizational goals, lack of internal alignment, ineffective link to customers, and a lack of external fit. These problems can be remedied through an overhaul of managerial principles.
References
Lampropoulos, N. (2010). Enabling the Exploitation of Tacit Knowledge: Open Issues and Opportunities. Web.
Mind Tools Ltd. (2011). Organization Design: Aligning Organizational Structure with Business Goals. Web.
Simons, R. (2005). Levers of organization design: how managers use accountability systems for greater performance and commitment. Harvard: Harvard Business Press.
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